Thursday, February 23, 2012

It's the End of the World as Abel Ferrara Knows It

End of the world movies don't always have to have big budgets and enormous special effects (e.g., Armageddon and much of Roland Emmerich's career). Don't get me wrong, these movies can still be fun, but more often than not, their stories are pretty stupid and the characters paper thin.

Writer/director Abel Ferrara (Driller Killer, Ms. 45, Crime Story (tv series) and The Bad Lieutenant -- wow, how's that for an eclectic and eccentric resume!) has a new film coming out called 4:44 - Last Day On Earth (trailer at collider.com). There's no rocketship/space ark being built, no time machine to escape to the past. Nope. none of that. In the story set during the final night on earth, we know the world's going to end at 4:44 am the next day; we follow Willem Dafoe, his girlfriend and a handful of other people as the curtain comes down on our human existence.

While the story sounds similar to Last Night, a 1998 end of the world movie from writer/director Don McKellar, Ferrara is a different kind of animal, so I can't wait to see what he does with this tale.